The archive.

Can law developed by judges rather than legislators still enforce oppression? In this review of Bruno Leoni’s Freedom and the Law, first published in 1962 and supplied here in its 1981 reprint, Murray N. Rothbard welcomes the challenge to legislative sovereignty but presses beyond institutional reform. Custom and decentralized courts, he argues, offer no guarantee that legal rules will protect liberty: inherited prohibitions on conspiracy and seditious libel expose the problem. His proposed alternative combines competing private judges with a fixed legal standard forbidding initiated violence against persons and property. The review makes visible a tension within libertarian legal thought: whether freedom rests on the process through which law emerges or on substantive principles that can condemn even established custom.

Mounting fear that the gold-exchange standard might buckle under an overhang of dollar claims frames this pedagogical survey of the leading blueprints for remaking the world's monetary order. Machlup sorts the proposals into five families—extending the gold-exchange standard, mutual central-bank assistance, centralized reserve creation, raising the price of gold, and freely flexible exchange rates—and weighs each against the charges of balance-of-payments strain, inadequate reserve growth, and fragility. He walks through the Keynes Clearing Union with its bancor, Triffin's plan to convert the IMF into a world central bank, and Maxwell Stamp's certificates for development aid, using balance-sheet T-accounts to separate genuine reserve creation from mere credit transfer. He declines to crown any single plan, offering analysis rather than verdict.

Gold and exchange reserves are needed only if exchange rates are not permitted to move to the level that would equilibrate the market at the moment.

Morgenstern’s brief, signed preface places two advance chapters at a precise moment in the revision of On the Accuracy of Economic Observations: on July 9, 1962, he expected the rewritten second edition to reach the printer within weeks. Its interest is documentary rather than argumentative. Readers can establish the chapters’ relation to the larger book and trace the acknowledged contributions of Econometric Research Program collaborators and typist Lois A. Crooks. The preface records publication circumstances and working relationships, not a thesis about statistical accuracy.

A child masters the grammar of its language long before it could state a single rule of syntax — a fact Hayek takes as the key to human conduct at large. This British Academy lecture argues that we are governed everywhere by rules we can follow but cannot articulate: in craftsmanship and athletics, in the sense of justice, and above all in perception, where we read gestures, moods, and purposes without knowing the cues that guide us. Drawing the theory of classification from his Sensory Order into linguistics, ethology, and social-science method, he distinguishes patterns we can specify from those we intuitively recognize but never fully state, defending the latter as indispensable data for understanding action. The argument closes on a Gödelian limit: no mind can wholly specify the rules on which its own workings depend.

What we recognize as purposive conduct is conduct following a rule with which we are acquainted but which we need not explicitly know.

Can stock-price changes look random while price levels retain a structure that a random walk cannot explain? In this 1962 research memorandum, Clive W. J. Granger and Oskar Morgenstern use spectral analysis to separate movements at different time scales. Their distinctive finding is not a dependable market cycle, but a methodological tension: differencing prices can obscure slow fluctuations, making a model appear more adequate than it is. Short-run movements largely support the random-walk benchmark; longer-run variation exceeds its predictions. Yet weak seasonal and business-cycle components offer little support for cyclical investment rules. The memorandum shows readers why evidence against a simple model need not yield a usable forecast—and how statistical transformations can conceal precisely the features an inquiry seeks to understand.

Bretton Woods was a dollar standard masquerading as gold, and its collapse — foreseen by the Misesians, missed by the Keynesians — frames this uncompromising monetary tract. Rothbard argues that the dollar was never an independent thing but a name for a weight of gold, roughly 1/20 of an ounce; a gold standard defines the unit, it does not 'fix a price.' His most radical claim targets fractional-reserve banking: notes and demand deposits issued beyond the specie actually held are fraudulent warehouse receipts, a legalized counterfeiting. Against the fear that a growing economy would run short of money, he answers that the supply does not matter, since purchasing power adjusts. His remedy is a full-reserve gold dollar with private coinage, the Federal Reserve liquidated and 'dollar' itself eventually retired for weight units such as the gold gram.

The natural tendency of the state is inflation.

Destroying an enemy’s communications might unleash the weapons it was meant to disable. This possibility gives Oskar Morgenstern’s 1962 memorandum, a lightly revised invited address, its central tension: nuclear security depends not only on the capacity to strike but on preserving political control on both sides. Morgenstern treats command as an organizational problem involving human judgment, selective information and resilience under attack—not simply faster signals or more reliable electronics. Safeguards against unauthorized action can impede legitimate orders; economical networks can prove dangerously fragile. His case for survivable communications available to adversaries offers a concrete way to examine why military advantage and strategic safety may diverge, and why an opponent’s ability to restrain its forces and negotiate can be a condition of one’s own security.

Grant that people are born unequal in body and mind—Mises does, taking the fact as his starting point and then turning it against the hierarchies usually built upon it. In status and warlike orders the stronger conquer, enslave, and rule; under capitalism, this 1962 essay argues, superior ability can profit only by serving consumers, so that ownership of the means of production becomes a public mandate withdrawn the moment buyers judge others would use it better. Much of the argument dismantles the phrase 'economic power': governmental power beats the disobedient into submission, whereas market 'power' amounts to no more than an invitation to a bargain either party may refuse. The closing pages assign the gifted not a right to command but a duty to persuade toward higher standards.

It is not business, but the consumers who ultimately determine what should be produced.

Why should a free society tie a person's material reward to the value of the services he renders others rather than to his moral worth? Hayek's answer, delivered as a 1961 address to the National Association of Manufacturers, rests on ignorance: no authority can know a person's information, effort, risks, or luck, so income must follow results and voluntary payment even when reward and merit visibly diverge. That divergence, he insists, should be acknowledged rather than hidden, for it is what keeps material life from being ruled by public approval. Economic freedom is no mere efficiency device, because we are free in choosing means we are free in choosing ends, and it demands particular moral beliefs in return: above all individual responsibility, which he defends against fashionable determinism, citing Szasz on the myth of mental illness.

It is only because we are free in the choice of our means that we are also free in the choice of our ends.

America's first nationwide boom and bust arrived without war, famine, or embargo to explain it, a puzzle that makes the depression of 1819 an ideal laboratory for watching a young republic reason about hard times. Rothbard reconstructs the inflationary land-and-import bubble fed by war finance and the Second Bank of the United States, then the Bank's sharp 1818 contraction that toppled prices, banks, and debtors alike. His real subject is the debate that followed: stay laws and debtor relief, schemes for state and national paper money, demands to restrict bank credit and enforce specie payment, and a rising protective-tariff movement. Sound-money and inflationist opinion, he shows, cut across region and class, seeding the later Jacksonian hard-money politics of Benton, Polk, and Kendall.

Beginning in the summer of 1818, the Bank precipitated the Panic of 1819 by a series of deflationary moves.

Treating a schoolteacher's lecture, a corporate research memo, a television broadcast, and a patent application as outputs of a single vast industry, this survey builds the first full accounting of what Machlup calls knowledge production in America. He measures education, research and development, the communication media, information machines, and the professional services, then sorts every knowledge worker into transporter, transformer, processor, interpreter, analyzer, or original creator. The reckoning startles: total knowledge production reached roughly $136 billion in 1958, near 29 percent of adjusted GNP, while knowledge-producing occupations tripled their share of the labor force between 1900 and 1959. Along the way he argues that government itself produces knowledge when it frames and communicates rules, and that American schooling could be compressed into markedly fewer years.

The production of knowledge is an economic activity, an industry, if you like.

Begin not with heaps of data but with the plain fact that men act—selecting means to reach chosen ends—and you have, Mises argues, the true starting point of economic science, which he presents as the most elaborated branch of praxeology. The essay rests on a theory of mind: sense data become knowledge only through the categories that order them, and causality itself is a precondition of all thought and action, not a mere laboratory habit. From this follows a sharp line between physics, which experiments and measures constants, and the sciences of human action, which have no constants to find—so that statistics and history record events without disclosing the theory that renders them intelligible. Against positivism, behaviorism, and the dream of social engineering, Mises defends methodological individualism and the categories by which human beings understand themselves as choosing agents.

For thousands of years the minds of physicians did not perceive germs and did not divine their existence.